artist statement

I am an interdisciplinary performance maker who works primarily in dance, movement-based theater and performance art, and secondarily with installation, video and sound. I make original ensemble and solo works in evening-length theatrical and endurance installation formats. My work triangulates somatically oriented physical states, media rich theatrical environments, and theoretical and conceptual ideas that often relate to contemporary social issues. While my formal training is in dance—release technique, improvisation, and various somatic modalities—my practice is interdisciplinary and collaborative. I team with theater, cinematography, textile, and sound artists to craft dense multilayered sound scores, massive sets, and live-feed and pre-recorded video, which amplify and texture the staged environments of our performance/installations. I am concerned with how internal knowings, personal experience, and/or somatic explorations intersect, collide, or merge with exterior fields of knowledge and identity. For example, Angry Women REvisited investigated embodied feminist histories in relationship to contemporary constructions of ‘women’, anger, politics, and art-making. My current project, Landscapes (2018 working title), is an exploration of internally prompted physicalities, complex geographical identities, and vast landscapes, alongside of a questioning of our personal and collective relationships to land, displacement, and decolonization. Through collaboration and experimentation, my aim is to challenge discrete disciplinary conventions while crafting compelling, multilayered, kinesthetically-oriented, non-linear performances that question (not answer) our implications in larger cultural, social, and political frameworks.